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Over the last couple of decades, a significant amount of research has been carried out on rural water supplies in developing countries, and have identified the fact that the communal water supply model is not sustainable everywhere, especially in sparsely populated rural areas; factors obstructing sustainability include lack of spare parts, management systems and private/public capacity. Despite their enormous contribution to the water sector, the extant studies stay within the subsidized communal water supply and capacity building, post construction support or management system. In other words, very few studies have been done into household (private) level water supply. The Self Supply model is an approach which provides support to households/communities to complement their efforts and accelerate sustainable access to safe water incrementally through improvement to traditional water sources (hand dug wells) by putting in their own investment. The Self Supply model may give significant benefits for sustainable safe water supplies, especially in sparsely populated rural areas, in comparison with the communal water supply though to date there has been little monitoring and systematic analysis of what impact these changes have made at the grassroots level. The standpoint of this study is pragmatic, and herein, mixing quantitative and qualitative methods was justified in order to design the research methodologies. The research was conducted in the Luapula Province of Zambia using a concurrent triangulation strategy to offset the weakness inherent within one method with the strengths of the other. The data was collected through inventory and sanitary surveys, water quality testing, household surveys, document analyses, focus group discussions and key informant interviews to determine the most appropriate water supply model for safe, accessible, sustainable, cost-effective and acceptable water supplies for households in sparsely populated rural areas of Zambia. The principal argument of this study is that reliance only on a communal water supply model limits the achievement of increased sustainable access to a safe water supply; hence a Self Supply model is needed which does not compete with the communal models but works alongside them in sparsely populated rural areas of developing countries for the purpose of increasing access and achieving sustainability. It was strongly defended by the overall findings that a Self Supply model could significantly reduce the faecal contamination risk in water quality and deliver a higher per capita water use and better convenience of access than the communal model; however its reliability with respect to the water source drying up needs to be monitored. Further, this does not mean that the communal model is not sustainable anywhere, rather that it is important to build blocks for a sustainable environment to access safe water in a symbiotic way between the communal and Self Supply models under the condition that the government and NGOs/external support agencies overcome the temptation to provide a water supply to rural dwellers as a giveaway social service.

A simultaneous demand and supply model for the U.S. ski/wakeboard boat market is estimated by three-stage least squares and iterated three-stage least squares methods using publicly available data. The model is used to test if, and to what extent, certain factors impact the annual quantity of new ski/wakeboard boats demanded and supplied. Statistical analysis suggests that the model does a good job of explaining the annual quantity of new ski/wakeboard boats demanded and supplied. The findings are most immediately beneficial to manufacturers and dealers. Dealers can use the results to better forecast demand which in turn will lead to more efficient production planning for manufacturers.

Inflation is one of the often used monetary indicators in conducting monetary policy. Even though money supply is an essential determinant of inflation, it is not used in inflation modeling. Currently, output gap is considered as most predicative variable. This thesis brings the empirical evidence on the hypothesis of money supply carrying more information on estimating inflation than the output gap. It is provided on the case of 16 developed European economies using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). BMA is a comprehensive approach that deals with the model uncertainty and thus solves the variable selection problem. The results of analysis confirmed that money supply includes more information of inflation than the output gap and thus should be used in inflation modeling. These outcomes are robust towards prior selection and high correlation of some variables.

Les instruments politiques sur les émissions de véhicules passagers visent à réduire les externalités négatives sur l'environnement causées par l'usage des véhicules. Des réglementations sur les émissions de CO2 ont été mises en place en Europe, aux États-Unis, en Chine et ailleurs. La cible réglementaire basée sur la moyenne des émissions des véhicules vendus par un constructeur devient plus contraignante au fil du temps. Cette thèse analyse comment les constructeurs automobiles anticipent et préparent leurs futurs portefeuilles de technologies afin de respecter les futurs objectifs politiques. Pour conduire cette analyse, cette thèse développe un modèle d'optimisation des choix technologiques sous la contrainte de diffusion technologique.Avec ce cadre de modélisation basé sur la limitation de la vitesse à laquelle une technologie peut se diffuser dans un marché, cette thèse étudie trois questions politiques. Dans un premier temps, nous analysons comment le type d'anticipation du futur peut modifier les choix technologiques faits à court et à long termes. Nous montrons qu'une anticipation du futur focalisée sur les objectifs de court terme peut empêcher l'atteinte de la cible à long terme. Respecter la cible à court terme n'est une condition ni nécessaire ni suffisante pour permettre le niveau d'émissions requis par la cible à long terme. De plus si l'anticipation du futur n'est pas parfaite, les choix technologiques vont être verrouillés dans des technologies à faible potentiel d'abattement créant ainsi une dépendance au sentier qui limite l'abattement potentiel à long terme.Dans un deuxième temps, nous nous intéressons à évaluer quantitativement comment l'indexation sur la masse des véhicules de la réglementation CO2 change les critères optimaux de choix. Nous montrons qu'il n'existe pas de différence significative dans le coût social de la mobilité entre les deux mécanismes de réglementation CO2 avec et sans indexation sur la masse pour une même cible d'émissions. Cependant les choix technologiques entre ces mécanismes sont différents, la réglementation CO2 indexée à la masse ne développe en aucun cas les technologies d'allègement.Dans un troisième temps, nous étudions comment les choix technologiques changent quand des politiques à objectifs multiples se superposent. Nous centrons notre analyse sur deux externalités associées à la mobilité: les émissions CO2 et la pollution de l'air locale. Nous montrons trois types d'impacts de la superposition de politiques. Premièrement, une politique technologiquement spécifique tel que le Mandat de Véhicule à Zéro Émission en combinaison avec la réglementation CO2 provoque le développement de technologies vertes coûteuses et empêche les technologies sales et peu coûteuses de disparaître. Dans le cas de l'application de la réglementation CO2 seule nous n'observons pas ce comportement. Deuxièmement, la superposition de politiques peut mener à un coût élevé quand les technologies adaptées à chacune des politiques sont très différentes. Troisièmement, nous trouvons un effet ambigu de la superposition de politiques relative à l'application d'une politique seule sur la performance environnementale. / Policy instruments on passenger vehicle emissions aim at reducing negative environmental externalities from vehicles use. To regulate CO2 emissions, fuel economy standards have been put in place in Europe and in the US, among others. These standards are made more stringent over time. This thesis analyzes how automotive firms anticipate and prepare their future technology portfolio to comply with expected future standards. To do so, we develop a model of optimal technology choice that captures technology diffusion constraints.With this framework, this thesis investigates three policy questions. First, we ask how the form of anticipation can affect near- and long-term technology choices. We find that focusing solely on near-term objectives can lead to failure to comply with a long-term target. In fact, meeting the near-term target is not a necessary nor a sufficient condition to satisfy long-term compliance. Moreover, when there is partial anticipation, as in a myopic view of the future, technology choices will be stuck with low abatement technologies creating a path dependency that limits long-term abatement potential.Second, we ask how much indexing fuel economy standard to mass (as in Europe or China) changes the optimal technology. We show that, for the same emission target, there is no significant difference in the social cost of mobility for an average vehicle with and without mass index. Thus a heavier vehicle fleet has the same cost than a lighter one. However, the technology choices are different, and mass indexed fuel economy standards lead to sidestepping lightweight technologies despite being cost effective from a CO2 emissions abatement point of view.Third, we ask how technology choices change when policies with multiple objectives overlap. We focus on two externalities associated with mobility: CO2 emissions and local air pollution. We show three type of effects of overlapping policies. First, a technology specific policy such as the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate in combination with a fuel economy standard induces carmakers to develop more expensive green technologies and prevents cheap, dirty technologies from disappearing compared to the case of a fuel economy standard alone. Second, the combination of policies can lead to very high costs when technologies adapted to each policy are very different. Third, we find an ambiguous effect of overlapping policies relative to single-objective policy in terms of emissions performance.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-04-13T13:50:42Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 2010347 bytes, checksum: 3a95a7a08d68f7438a013ab7bc0d2bc3 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-13T13:50:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 2010347 bytes, checksum: 3a95a7a08d68f7438a013ab7bc0d2bc3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-04 / The thesis studies, in three chapters, on the provision of public goods in municipalities. The first chapter puts in competition two alternative specifications, one on the demand side and another on the supply side, to a set of 5285 municipalities data for 2010 in order to test the hypothesis that the relevance of the models that explain the behavior local government spending can depend on the size of the population of the jurisdictions. The econometric methodology uses a combination of Test J proposed by Davidson and MacKinnon (1981), with the threshold suggested by Hansen (2000), as a data screening method to test whether the response of local governments to their constituents is stable between small and large municipalities. Results show that the median voter model applies to smaller cities, with great population size ranging between 13604 and 13661 inhabitants, depending on the congestion function used. Nevertheless, it rejected in 2293 municipalities, for which the model-oriented supply fits better. In the second chapter, these alternative models of determination of public provision in order to measure the impact of the size of cities on the quality of public services applies - via analysis of advertising and rivalry of goods - in 5268 Brazilian municipalities based on the Theory of Clubs. For both models, the results point to the existence of spatial correlation between municipalities, suggesting that spending patterns in a given locality influence on the fiscal decisions of neighbors. Proves the hypothesis that the size of the clubs, and the cost of utilities differentiate the results of the provision of action, supporting the literature on the subject which argues that in smaller jurisdictions proximity of voters with its public officials exerts more pressure and control over their political acts, and that aggregate individual preferences have less heterogeneity and can represent the community as a whole. This result yields a larger congestion effect to the larger cities, which goes against the international literature. Finally, using a set of data that make up Brazilian localities Public Consortia Inter-municipal public services, the third chapter aims to establish empirical evidence for a phenomenon called by Oates (1988) as "zoo-effect." According to this effect, the lowest level of expenditure in smaller towns should not be explained by the smaller clusters, but simply by the fact that certain categories of spending - like a zoo - they need a minimum population size to be provided. Thus, the positive relationship between population size and local spending on public services does not take into account the fact that in the most populous cities, the basket of services offered is broader and more diverse, and for this reason, estimates of existing congestion tend to be overestimated. By spatial statistics confirmed the hypothesis of the zoo effect on municipalities, and that the more diversified the range of services expands the range of services in neighboring areas, which explains the interaction between the municipalities as a way to get better and higher level of public services to its citizens. Evidence shows that the intensity of the effect depends on the urban-rural gradient, with the biggest phenomenon in urban areas due to more substantial economies of scale in these locations. / A tese versa, em três capítulos, sobre a provisão de bens públicos nos municípios brasileiros. O primeiro capítulo coloca em competição duas especificações alternativas, uma do lado da demanda e outra do lado da oferta, para um conjunto de dados de 5285 municípios brasileiros para 2010, a fim de testar a hipótese de que a relevância dos modelos que explicam o comportamento das despesas públicas locais pode depender do tamanho da população das jurisdições. A metodologia econométrica usa a combinação do Teste J, proposto por Davidson e MacKinnon (1981), com o Threshold, sugerido por Hansen (2000), como um método de triagem de dados capaz de testar se a resposta dos governos locais aos seus eleitores é estável entre os municípios de pequeno e de grande porte. Os resultados permitem inferir que o modelo do eleitor mediano aplica-se às cidades menores, com tamanho ótimo populacional variando entre 13604 e 13661 habitantes, dependendo da função de congestionamento utilizada. Não obstante, é rejeitado em 2293 municípios, para os quais o modelo orientado para a oferta apresenta melhor ajuste. No segundo capítulo, aplica-se os referidos modelos alternativos de determinação da provisão pública a fim de mensurar o impacto do tamanho das cidades sobre a qualidade dos serviços públicos - via análise da publicidade e da rivalidade dos bens – em 5268 municípios brasileiros baseado na Teoria dos Clubes. Para os dois modelos, os resultados apontam a existência da correlação espacial entre os municípios, sugerindo que os padrões de gastos em determinada localidade influencia nas decisões fiscais de vizinhos. Comprova-se a hipótese de que o tamanho dos clubes e o custo dos serviços públicos diferenciam os resultados da ação de provisão, corroborando com a literatura sobre o tema a qual defende que em jurisdições menores a proximidade dos eleitores com seus agentes públicos exerce maior pressão e controle sobre seus atos políticos, e que preferências individuais agregadas apresentam menor heterogeneidade e podem representar a comunidade como um todo. Este resultado gera um efeito congestionamento maior para as maiores cidades, o que vai de encontro à literatura internacional. Por fim, usando um conjunto de dados de localidades brasileiras que formam Consórcios Públicos Intermunicipais de serviços públicos, o terceiro capítulo visa estabelecer evidências empíricas para um fenômeno denominado por Oates (1988) como “efeito-zoo”. De acordo com esse efeito, o nível mais baixo de despesas em cidades menores não deve ser explicado pela menor aglomeração, mas simplesmente pelo fato de que certas categorias de gastos - como um zoológico - precisam de um tamanho mínimo populacional para serem fornecidos. Destarte, a relação positiva entre o tamanho da população e o gasto local em serviços públicos não leva em conta o fato de que nos municípios mais populosos, a cesta de serviços ofertados é mais ampla e mais diversificada, e por essa razão as estimativas de congestionamento existentes tendem a ser superestimadas. Através da estatística espacial confirmou-se a hipótese do efeito zoo nos municípios brasileiros, e que a maior diversificação na gama de serviços expande a oferta de serviços em áreas vizinhas, justificando a interação entre os municípios como forma de se obter melhor e maior nível de serviços públicos para seus cidadãos. As evidências apontam que a intensidade do efeito depende do gradiente urbano-rural, sendo o fenômeno maior em áreas urbanizadas, devido às economias de escala mais substanciais nessas localidades.